World Usability Day - November 3, 2005
Events Planned Around the World Will Showcase “Making It Easy”

Contact: Sue Leitner, Prosperity Communications
513-520-6184
sleitner@fuse.net

Press release - March 4, 2005

(Chicago, Illinois) – The Usability Professionals’ Association is organizing the first annual World Usability Day on November 3, 2005. This worldwide series of events will promote awareness of the benefits of usability engineering and user-centered design. Activities will be held at the local level all over the world, and will be occurring on the same day. This year’s focus is e-government, while also including commercial applications. The theme is “Making It Easy.”

Several local UPA chapters and sister organizations worldwide have already begun to coordinate participation in cities around the world, including Boston; Chicago; Dallas-Ft. Worth; Hong Kong; Indianapolis; London; Minneapolis-St. Paul; Montreal; New York City; Ottawa; Rome; Tel Aviv, and Zurich.

“Any event that brings user experience to the forefront of people’s minds is a good event for World Usability Day,” says Elizabeth Rosenzweig, Principal Research Scientist at Kodak, and Co-Chair of the event. “The goal is to create a critical mass of enough interesting stories that will capture the collective imagination of innovative people around the world.”

This international event will have a rolling timeline, documented on the worldusabilityday.org website. The day will begin with events in Australasia, and then move westward to end with an event at the DUX 2005 (Designing for User Experiences) Conference in San Francisco.

“It is not enough to have and use new technology such as the Internet, cell phones, PDAs, digital cameras and just accept that sometimes it does not do what you want or thought it should,” says Rosenzweig. “People need to see that technology is not driving us, but we are crafting and using technology to serve us. It is an important and simple message. Technology should always be usable.”

Any organization with an interest in improving user’s experience of technology is invited to participate in this event. Details for participants are available at www.worldusabilityday.org.